Lennard graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2005 (Natural Science Tripos (II) - Neuroscience). As part of this degree, he worked on the development of viral vectors for transgene deliver. Whilst at Cambridge he was awarded the Sun Hung Kai-Kwok Foundation Scholarship and Larmor Prize for “intellectual qualifications, moral conduct and practical activities”.
He then studied clinical medicine at the University of Oxford and graduated in 2008. On graduation and working as a clinician, he worked in the South West Thames Institute of Renal research researching the process of Epithelial Mesenchymal Transition (2011).
Lennard was then successful in his application to the Medical Research Council (UK) for a national Clinical Training Research Fellowship in 2013. He performed his DPhil with Professor Ian Tomlinson at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford. He researched “Gene Drivers of Metastasis in Colorectal cancer” and lead to a Core Trainee Research Award (2016) and a section prize at the BSG (2017).
He then applied for a BRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship to work as a postdoc to enable him to develop his skills in bioinformatics, next generation sequencing and the creation of highly phenotyped Clinical Cohorts. This was performed at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Ian Tomlinson and Professor David and Rachel Kerr.
Lennard was then recruited in 2018 to the University of Birmingham to work at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences and develop his research group as a Senior Clinical Training Research Fellow and then as an Honorary Research Fellow.